1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medium replaceable recording and reproducing apparatus in which recording and/or reproducing is made on a replaceable recording medium such as a floppy disk, an optical disk, or a detachable hard disk.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a medium replaceable recording and reproducing apparatus, when a recording medium is inserted and a state capable of recording/reproducing is established, the apparatus is subjected to initialization. In the case of an optical disk apparatus, for example, when an optical disk is loaded onto a spindle motor, a process of initializing a drive (such as start-up of the spindle motor, lighting-up of a laser and pull-in to focus tracking servo) and a process of initializing a controller (such as determination of medium type, maker, etc. and setting of recording power and reproducing power of the laser, etc.) are performed regardless of whether the loaded optical disk is a newly-loaded medium or a previously loaded medium which has remained inserted and simply reloaded.
In such a recording and reproducing apparatus, however, when recording/reproducing is not made on a recording medium for a long period of time, there has been often implemented an operation of stopping a spindle motor as medium driving means, unloading the recording medium from the spindle motor for retreatment, or ejecting the recording medium upon a user depressing an eject button (i.e., unloading the recording medium from the spindle motor and making it exposed to a removable position) for the purpose of reducing power consumption or preventing damage of the medium and the apparatus due to head crash, etc.
Because whether or not a recording medium has been replaced cannot be discriminated in the above case, it is necessary to check attributes of the recording medium at the time of starting the apparatus again to perform such an operation as recording/reproducing, meaning that the initialization as mentioned above must be executed for each restart of the apparatus. This has raised the problem that reading/writing of data cannot be promptly processed because of the time necessary for the initialization to be executed prior to start of the operation such as recording/reproducing.
Therefore, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 4-10276 discloses an apparatus of a type for detecting a loading/unloading operation of a recording medium onto a spindle motor even during stoppage of the spindle motor, and for omitting a part of the process required to restart operation of the spindle motor when the recording medium has not been unloaded from the spindle motor.
With the above disclosed apparatus, the loading and unloading operation of the recording medium onto the spindle motor can be detected and, when the recording medium has not been unloaded from the spindle motor, a part of the process required to restart operation of the spindle motor is omitted, making it possible to shorten the time necessary for the initialization and promptly restart such an operation as recording/reproducing.
In the above disclosed apparatus, however, once the recording medium is unloaded from the spindle motor, whether or not a recording medium has been replaced cannot be discriminated. Thus, even when the recording medium is loaded onto the spindle motor again, the usual initialization is executed and, therefore, the time required to reach a state capable of recording/reproducing on the medium cannot be shortened.